The Devil's Toy Redux Victoriaville
2015 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Mathieu Charland
Genres: documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative
Victoriaville's independent skate shops and network of indoor and outdoor parks show skateboarding thriving in the suburbs.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A skateboarding doc about a Canadian suburb feels like the safest possible premise—except Charland treats it with such subdued, almost elegiac patience that it stops being a sports film and becomes something genuinely strange, which I respect even if I'm not sure it lands.
The contemplative register here recalls a particular lineage of North American documentary practice—Wiseman's observational restraint meets the poetic earnestness of NFB tradition—though the suburban setting risks undercutting the formal ambitions at play.
What rescues this from feel-good sports documentary is Charland's decision to let the *emptiness* of those parks breathe as much as the skating itself; that tonal restraint—refusing to sentimentalize either the landscape or the culture—is what makes seven minutes feel considered rather than merely captured.